Members of the UC community filled the Elliston Poetry Room for Campana's reading.

Joseph Campana is the author of “The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity” as well as two poetry collections titled “The Book of Faces” and “Natural Selections.”

"The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity"

"The Book of Face"

"Natural Selections"

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2013/10/30/visiting-writers-series-joseph-campana/feed/0A Review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Lettershttp://blogs.bu.edu/core/2013/04/30/a-review-of-kurt-vonneguts-letters/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2013/04/30/a-review-of-kurt-vonneguts-letters/#respondTue, 30 Apr 2013 16:21:27 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=2501The Core presents a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Letters, by Keith Miller. Vonnegut is not a writer directly studied in Core classes, however, his influence on the literary world is worth examining. Here is an excerpt:

Most of Vonnegut’s early writing is – despite his protestations about “genre-ism” – fairly easy to ghettoise as science fiction, though he is manifestly a “hard” SF writer (space ships, tentacles) who would like to be a “soft” one, exploring the Philip K Dick stuff about memory and identity. One of his richest themes – very notably in Slaughterhouse 5, which contains elements of SF, as well as memoir, realism and several other notes – is the conceit that we’re all somehow adrift, rogue cosmonauts in our own lives, an idea that is by no means confined to genre fiction (it is present in Proust, though clad there in white tie rather than a space suit).
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The writ of this collection of letters runs from about 1950 until 2007, the year of Vonnegut’s death. It is not exactly packed with revelations. We don’t write to those we see every day; anthologies such as these are documents of absence, plaster casts of empty rooms – involuted autobiographies. It’s only when Kurt, teaching in Iowa, steps up his correspondence with Jane, his first wife, that we sense their relationship is amiss – sure enough, he soon notifies a friend that “something telepathic has busted between us”.

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It is for their literary rather than their documentary value that these letters commend themselves, in the end. They have a directness and a consistency, a scruffy but ensnaring humanity, that I’ve never quite been able to find in Vonnegut’s fiction, either two decades ago as a refusenaut and psychonik, or over the past fortnight, researching this piece. Kurt seems by turns kind, engaged, imaginative, witty, self-deprecating (“I write with a big black crayon… grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist,”) and – on various fronts – courageous.

]]>http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2013/04/30/a-review-of-kurt-vonneguts-letters/feed/0Times Higher Education – “Creative Writing”http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2013/04/22/times-higher-education-creative-writing/
http://blogs.bu.edu/core/2013/04/22/times-higher-education-creative-writing/#respondMon, 22 Apr 2013 14:00:07 +0000http://blogs.bu.edu/core/?p=2402The Core presents an interesting feature from Times Higher Education, in which they offer their insight on what the causes, and possible consequences, of the rise of “creative writing” may be. Here is a sample:

Despite the speed and apparent smoothness with which creative writing has become incorporated into English departments, or (especially in the US) as a separate department alongside English, its institutionalisation is complex and deceptive. It is obvious, however, that its recent and remarkable expansion is closely bound up with the marketisation of higher education, especially in the US and the UK. Once you start thinking of “the student” as “the customer”, and once the customer’s own preferences are “prioritised” (to echo the business-speak that has come to prevail), it is inevitable that you should expect to see more courses in creative writing than in, say, medieval English prose or 18th-century pastoral verse.

In important (if insufficiently acknow-ledged) respects, the recent expansion of creative writing testifies to a peculiar restoration of a conception of writing as personal self-expression. As scholar and consultant Robert Rowland Smith comments in On Modern Poetry: From Theory to Total Criticism (2012): “We’re at a point where more poetry is being written than published, let alone read, mainly because poetry has come to be considered so much as an outlet for personal feelings – the poem as the stylized mode of the journal entry. Even among poems that do get published – and there is a parallel with recent art – the emphasis on the recording of subjective experience is overwhelming.”

Leave all your worries about otherness – the unconscious, death, not to mention poverty and injustice, the environment, etc – behind. Come and join the world of self-affirming, self-expressive creative writing. In all of this it would be easy to concur with American literary critic Mark McGurl’s characterisation of the rise of creative writing. As he shows in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), writing has become overwhelmingly “the product of a system”.